I'm a startup guy, first and foremost. I like building things. Companies, Films, Books - they all feel like creation. I've started and built four companies. Most recently, the video curation company waywire.com.
Along the way I've made some films, most notably "Seven Days In September" - about the week after 9/11 in New York. And I've written on the coming together of tech and human skills in my book "Curation Nation" (McGraw/Hill 2012).
As a lifelong New Yorker, and serial entrepreneur, I was named New York City’s first ever Entrepreneur at Large - by the Bloomberg Administration. A pretty cool honor and a fun gig. I get to preach the gospel of NYC.
Waywire.com is my full time gig - and it keeps me busy. Video is just getting started on the web - and Curation is the secret sauce that makes it work.
I'm passionate about Startups, what they're doing to sparkplug the digital economy.

Leading From Behind -- The Secret To Jeff Bezos' Success

It was late at night – and the view out the windows at the small club venue at Jazz at Lincoln Center was spectacular. On stage – five amazing players, who ironically make up the Matt Wilson Quartet. The band was on fire, with twists and turns that were both rhythmical and surprising. The Band’s leader, Matt Wilson, was easy to hear, but hard to see. He was behind the horns, next to the stand-up bass. He was the drummer, which made me think of Jeff Bezos.

Ok, it’s a leap, but not really.

Wilson was leading from behind, driving the band with a powerful rhythm and beat… but not your typical band leader, the charismatic front guy. He was pushing, driving them forward, to great effect, which is what I think about Amazon. It’s easy now to shower Bezos with acclaim as he’s clearly brought Amazon to a position that’s leading both ecommerce, and through AWS, web services broadly. But it wasn’t always that way.

In fact pretty much through most of Bezos’ driving passion to build “The Everything Store,” people thought he was pretty much nuts. He wasn’t a developer, wasn’t a retailer, wasn’t an author, wasn’t even a “visionary” in the way that someone like Steve Jobs was. He didn’t demand a cultish devotion to him, and, in fact, it seems like through much of his drive to grow, he accepted the fact that people join his mission and then step off the bus, overwhelmed by the workload, the drive, or the shear scope and audacity of the vision.

Bezos hardly seemed distracted by people who questioned his drive or appetite.

And he wasn’t above borrowing insights or solutions that worked for others. The $9.99 ebook pricing wasn’t researched or tested, it was a learning from Steve Jobs .99 cents per song for music. The concept of membership via Amazon Prime, a learning from his conversations with Costco’s founder. And what about AWS? Was it part of a grand vision, or more an understanding that he – and others – where having trouble provisioning web services to grow businesses?

Leading from behind takes a particular skill and drive. Larry and Sergey are engineers, and so were able to lead their troops of hard-core coders into battle. Bezos wasn’t able to say “follow me” to developers, but that didn’t slow him down. Time and time again, as Brad Stone reports in his book; The Everything Store, Bezos was able to be both a partner and a competitor. When he determined that Zappos had a model he needed inside his orbit, he both reached out to buy them, and at the same time set out to compete with them by driving consumer expectations of free shipping. In the end, Zappos joined Amazon. Similarly with books, as Bezos both partnered with, and competed with, publishers to drive the growth of the ebook business.

The formula is in some ways remarkably simple; look ahead five years or more, determine inevitable changes, and then go all out to get there first – and command the new market. Would books become digital, and portable, and electronic? Certainly. Would print publishers push to drive this change? Not as long as it disrupts their model or their margins. But Bezos, with no loyalty to the past, faced no such limitations.

Two books appear to have helped shape Bezos’ business strategy and insights. “From Good To Great: Why Some Companies make the Leap… and Others Don’t” by Jim Collins, and ”The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail” by Clay Christensen.

In the Collins book – he lists Seven Characteristics of companies that went from “Good to Great”

Leaders who are humble and driven make the company win. He calls it: Level 5 Leadership

People first, roles second. Get the right people on the bus, then figure out where to go.

The Stockdale paradox—never give up hope, but confront the brutal truth of the situation

Hedgehog Concept: What lights your fire – “passion”? Be the best in the world at one thing? What makes you money?

A Culture of Discipline

Using tech to drive growth.

The Flywheel: Many small initiatives act on each other

And looking at them, you can see the seeds of Bezos innovations like AWS as a technology flywheel, Bezos’ drive to hire from the right competitors, and using technology innovations like Amazon One-Click, even when it’s controversial.

And in the Clay Christensen book, The Innovator’s Dilemma” again we see the roots or perhaps endorsement of Bezos thinking. Christensen calls it “disruptive innovation” - and you can see how Bezos both embraced and competed with the publishing industry in his launch of the Kindle and the $9.99 pricing model.

Back at Lincoln Center – with the Matt Wilson Quartet swinging and the room entranced, you can see the power of being just out of the limelight – driving the beat without having to be up front. Maybe it was just the rhythm of a great night, but I couldn’t help but think that Bezos and Wilson would like each other.

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